SEEKING WORK AT JOB FAIR? DON’T COUNT ON SUCCESS

Many companies looking for ‘diamond in the rough’

Juan Torres stepped outside the ballroom at downtown San Diego’s Marriott Marquis and Marina on Tuesday with an air of optimism.

“I got seven bites,” he said.

A bite, in this case, could mean a job.

Torres, 32, of Chula Vista, had just left a job fair at the waterfront hotel, where 26 employers were recruiting for open positions. He said seven of them expressed interest in him.

Some of the jobs available? Selling life insurance for a starting salary of $500 per week; auditing the government for $45,000 a year. Sprint, AT&T, Sharp and Ace Parking were some of the others with booths. Torres and about 1,300 others had registered for the career fair, hosted by Careerbuilder.com and the University of Phoenix.

Torres, who has an MBA from the University of Phoenix, has been unemployed for six months. Tuesday was his 12th job fair in that time.

Torres is one of the estimated 147,800 San Diego County residents who are unemployed, according to the state Employment Development Department. The county’s unemployment rate was 9.2 percent in June, but employers in the region still added 13,400 jobs. It’s the most jobs added in a month since April 2010.

But it’s still not easy to find work, and job fairs are about as hard as it gets, said John Challenger, CEO of Chicago-based employment researcher Challenger, Gray and Christmas. At the fairs, candidates line up to meet recruiters for a matter of seconds or minutes. It’s not with the person who would ultimately hire them, and some don’t even accept paper resumes anymore; they refer job seekers to the website for submitting their resumes.

Challenger said many companies are very specific in what they’re looking for, often a “diamond in the rough.” Job fairs allow them a chance to meet a large number of people quickly.

“If you were to make the primary focus of your job search attending job fairs, you’d likely be out of work for a long period of time,” Challenger said.

But there are strategies for standing out at a job fair, said Susan Roberts-Egley, services coordinator for the East County Career Center. She said the best thing a job seeker can do is fill out a company’s application online ahead of time. That way, the brief conversation with a recruiter is about possibilities, not if a company is hiring.

“Do all that leg work ahead of time, make sure that that one minute is that sales pitch about you,” she said. “You’re not going to that job fair to get a job that day. If you do think that, then you’re wasting your time. … What you are going there to do is a face-to-face meeting so that you stand out from those other hundreds of people.”